The gratitude enquiry: investigating reciprocity in three community projects

This Chapter is a case study of three community projects that formed part of my research project: The Gratitude Enquiry. It draws from practice in order to identify the reciprocal movement of give and take that exists between participants, and in the whole community of a participatory, collaborative arts project. It covers three projects: I live in it, an intergenerational dance project, Fanmail, a visual art project with adults recovering form mental ill health, and Bread, an intergenerational baking and storytelling project

Rooms with a View participant feedback

Feedback from Participants in Rooms with a Vie

Rooms with a view banner design

PDF of design for four banners that were used in post show exhibition

The spaces in between: Relationships in participatory work

The spaces in between Relationships in participatory work TaPRA 2016 In his book A Fortunate Man (1967) John Berger reflects on the ways in which the GP, John Sassall negotiates his place as an outsider, and builds connections in the village where he works. This happens partly through becoming involved in joint enterprises. Berger points to an occasion when Sassall is part of a group of men who are trying to mend a car engine. 'It is as though the speakers bend over the subject to examine it in precise detail, until, bending over it their heads touch'. The meeting place, where connections are made, is the work. In this paper I want to examine the building of connectivity through the enterprise of making a piece of work together. As I have written elsewhere, a project can create an exoskeleton, holding a group of individuals through its purpose and direction, and allowing them to co-create bonds within it. Claire Bishop cautions against valuing work only because of the social bonds created (The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents ARTFORUM 2006), but I am aware that what manifests between people, and not only within individuals, in terms of growth, experimentation, connection, impacts the work being made, and the experience of making. I will revisit research that I have undertaken for Magic Me, into the way in which different art forms invite participants to connect with one another in very diverse ways, (Detail and Daring 2010), and introduce my current research project, where I am examining the action of gratitude within three participatory projects, a 'granularity of tiny interactions' that create a reciprocity that strengthens the individual and the group

I live in it/Programme

Programme for I live in it/Gratitude Enquir

A Marvelous Experiment: Intergenerational practice

A reflection on the idea of temporary community within Magic Me's intergenerational performance project

Reasons to be Cheerful: resilience , structure and care-fulness in socially engaged practice

Reasons to be cheerful: Resilience, structure and care-fulness in socially engaged practice. In this paper, I will return to the research I conducted in 2012-2013, with Dr Katharine Low, into the teaching of socially engaged theatre practice. In this study, we considered the burgeoning opportunities to study Applied Theatre at MA level, and compared this with the pathway that many practitioners take, that of apprenticing themselves to more experienced practitioners, and/or just 'diving in'. Considering questions of resilience, I will examine the ways in which practitioners can learn from, challenge and support one another. Drawing from filmed interviews with experienced practitioners who had not studied Applied Theatre, as well as from interviews with students I will explore the ways in which exchanges of learning can criss-cross generations of artists, often disrupting notions of experience and 'eldership', but sometimes confirming them. Drawing also from my own survey, 'Reasons to be cheerful' (2014) I will attempt to identify the aspects of the work that keep people going for often long working lives in socially engaged practice. While this survey revealed a dominant sense of satisfaction and nourishment for the artist, this needs to be set against awareness of what, in the 2013 study, one Lecturer in Applied Theatre described as a 'vortex of anxiety' evident in students as they began to unpick and explore complex ethical issues and precarious and sometimes dangerous contexts. Ahmed's critique of binaries of oppressor-oppressed in Freire and Boal's writing provides a frame through which to propose a complex web of teaching and learning, resistance and creativity, which supports artists and their collaborators

Dimensions of family empowerment in work with so called ‘troubled’ families

The Troubled Families Programme has provided an impetus for interventions with families with multiple disadvantages. This article identifies the prevalence of a government discourse of ‘empowerment’ around such interventions, which fails to reflect the contested nature of the term. Qualitative interviews with families supported by the programme and their keyworkers offer an insight into their experiences and a valuable alternative to government rhetoric. It is argued that government discourses equate ‘family empowerment’ with responsibilisation, seeking to reduce the resources deployed in supporting families whilst strengthening state power to define acceptable forms of family life. By contrast, family and keyworker discourses of ‘empowerment’ are founded in the redistribution of resources towards such families, advocacy strategies, psychological support and an understanding of power relations within and beyond families, which enable families to resist specific attempts at the exercise of professional power, albeit remaining subject to a more general exercise of state control

Rooms with a View: Disrupting and Developing Narratives of Community through Intergenerational practice.

Rooms with a View is a research report by Dr Caoimhe McAvinchey from the department of Drama at Queen Mary University of London and Sue Mayo, Goldsmiths, University of London. This report documents and examines our Rooms with a View project – our two year collaborative project with over 200 participants from Tower Hamlets, which culminated in the creation of Speak As You Find, an intergenerational site-specific performance created in Tower Hamlets in Autumn 2015

Rooms with a View/Love East London Flyer

Flyer to advertise Open workshops for Rooms with a Vie